


Fragments

by beknighted



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Apocalpyse Five, Apocalypse, Dark, Dark Humor, Heavy Angst, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Number Five | The Boy has PTSD, Sad, Snapshots, Suicidal Thoughts, Vignette, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26869801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beknighted/pseuds/beknighted
Summary: Five Hargreeves spends forty years in the wasteland. He'll remember much of it later, but not all of it. Mostly the parts that make him smile, and the early days, the most bleak.Somehow he learns to survive, and more importantly, to want to live.
Kudos: 26





	1. Burying Them

Number Five is familiar with the ravages of time. More than most—he’d gotten lost in its stream, he hadn't resurfaced. Accordingly, he knows that time should probably corrupt memories, diluting them beyond recognition, and yet one, one above all others, seems to grow clearer and heavier even after everything else fades. 

In this memory he isn’t strong yet. Still a kid, really. 

It takes a while. Altogether he thinks it might have been two days. At first he works methodically, without crying or anything, unknowingly smearing more layers of ash onto his face with the back of his hand whenever he wipes his hair out of the way, until the hollows of his eyes are skull-like with grime. First move the stone, then the bodies. Long since stiffened, resisting being dragged, and his fingers are cold and keep slipping, and he crushes one of his fingernails with a brick, and it turns a dark blue in the days afterwards. 

Then the graves—getting an intact shovel is a delay, but he finds a hardware store on the corner of Eighth and Trevor Streets, one still advertising its spring sale in neon posterboard. Although the ground is shattered, it’s not easy to find soil that won’t dent the shovel. But Five is nothing if not relentless. 

Another thing: the sound of flies. 

A few of them survived somehow, maggots in some crevice of the underground, and the whine of them drives him crazy, drives him almost to tears. He covers the bodies with tarp, unable to look at the glassy eyes for long, desperate to keep the flies off of them, but he is fighting a losing battle. Most of the time he just wants to run. And yet he can’t leave them like this, not again. 

By the time he’s finished digging the shallow graves, his arms and hands are shaking hard enough to make his teeth chatter, and he spends the night in the darkness of the pitted rubble, listening to the wind howl through the open air now unbroken by skyscrapers. He feels like the ground has fallen abyssally away from under him. The wind, so human sounding, stirs an especial terror in him, for the initial numbness has thawed and he realizes the fact of it, of being here. This isn’t a dream. This is the rest of his life, day after day. Sparks leap up on the horizon, and all around him is a beating red light from the fires that will not cease for several months, eating away at what’s left of things, fed by fuel and refuse. 

At some bleak hour late in the night he tries to blink again, in time, but he can’t. 

The sun doesn't so much rise as seep. Ash clouds have grown to a Vesuvian height. 

The one he thinks is Klaus is surprisingly light. His own expression glazed, like a sleep-walker, Five studies him for a moment before he rolls him into his allotted hole in the ground—the hollowness of his cheekbones, the pale skin. He wonders if life was unkind to him. Most likely. 

Allison is tall, and her face looks gentle, like she’d died instantly. Just the morning before they’d been fighting over something, some stupid argument or prank involving toothpaste and exchanged ketchup, he can’t even remember now. He wonders if maybe time travel cooked his brain as well. 

Diego and his serious array of knives—it almost makes Five smile, but he doesn’t think he will smile again. He’d been sitting next to him at breakfast. 

Luther is the most difficult. Five struggles for hours. He’s somehow ended up a giant, and Five begins to think he’ll have to spend another night in the shadow of their mounded graves, but at last he manages it, and the man falls with an ungraceful thud into the dark earth. Five realizes he’d been so intent on moving him that he hadn’t had the moment of introspection that he’d saved for the others, and something about this breaks him at last, and he collapses to the ground, busting his knee in the process. He’s dehydrated and so it hurts his throat and ribs to cry, dry heaves that leave him gasping. There’s a coppery taste in his mouth. 

Enough. 

He stands, brushing his trembling hands on his shorts and only managing to make them dirtier, and finishes it once and for all: the shovel is seized, the packed earth goes back where it came from, and the grown-up Hargreeves are buried properly, not by masonry. It is a courtesy he cannot afford to give to the rest of them, the horrible thousands of them, with their strollers and film cameras and buttoned jackets and singed hair, forms strewn across the city streets and beyond. He tries not to look at them, but he can’t help it. He’s looking for Vanya and Ben. 

He’ll keep looking for them for many days.


	2. Magpie

At first he collects things because he needs them to avoid starvation. Later, because they’re beautiful, intelligent, wholesome, and it’s his mind that’s starving. 

In the former category falls the essentials, which he amasses early on, because he is fortunate enough to be clever and stubborn enough to keep living. He carries these in his arms—cans of beans and corn, a dented flask of water, a steak knife. They’d survived whatever the hell it was that had caused the apocalypse. Not a nuclear bomb, as Five had at first suspected, because as each mirage-like day simmers into the next, he's not killed by radiation poisoning. 

Anyway, he finds a backpack with one strap, and later a wagon. His hands are always seeking and fixing, maybe trying to make up for the failure of his powers to take him back home, and so it is an easy enough task to patch things up, sift through the liquified shelves of supermarkets and find things that are still edible and potable. This is not to say that it is easy to survive. He’s not used to doing anything for himself, let alone scraping together a routine in this hellscape, but he manages. He steals fire from the burning trash heaps. He picks things clean with restless fingers. He recedes into himself, his ribs aching when he tries to sleep on hard ground. He wraps himself in clothes without a clear owner; he won’t be able to bring himself to rob the dead until he’s a little older, less shell-shocked. 

Eventually Five will have no qualms about almost anything—he’ll track the white powder of bones right into his cobbled-together living room. 

In the fifth week, he finds a miracle: unburned seeds. Tomatoes. These he keeps in the pocket of the bomber jacket that he found under a smoldering car, and in the other pocket, sunglasses that are a little too big for him, a chess piece (a bishop). They are the first of the relics that he gathers, initially each having a contrived future utility, but eventually he gives up and embraces his irrational magpie nature as just a distraction from everything else. The trick is to not keep things for long, to not be burdened by them. He discards almost as much as he collects. It’s about the feeling that they spark when he finds them, usually a memory, because feeling and memory are scarce resources in the apocalypse. 

A large, almost antique-looking key: the time Klaus had stolen the keys off of a natural history museum security guard and proposed they sleep in the exhibits, and scare the shit out of people the next morning, but of course Five reminded him he could have just let them all in, key or no key, and their father caught them anyway—

A chipped red coffee cup: the time Allison and Luther were outed for making hot chocolate for the third consecutive night, God forbid, at 2 AM, and only because Pogo had heard the crash of Luther tripping over his own feet and thought it was a home invasion— 

A tiny metallic music note, probably a charm from a child’s necklace, which glints in the pale sunlight on his journey to the outbound highways. At this finding his chest tightens, and he hears the mournful sound of a violin on the wind, just one of many phantoms. A day doesn't go by that he doesn't wonder what happened to her, and to Ben too, and if it was better or worse that he hadn’t found them in the ruins of the house. Were they there after all, with the rest of their siblings, and just buried too deep? Would he even recognize her? She doesn’t have a tattoo like the others. 

But these were all transient discoveries, ultimately meaningless. 

More importantly: the eyeball. 

He takes it out and looks at it when he begins to forget the point of carrying on, and that bitter certainty always rises in his throat like bile. Clutched in Luther’s dead hand, this belonged to whoever they died fighting. It’s warm because it never leaves his pocket. He memorizes the serial number before the first six months have passed. 

Finally, a complete list of his discoveries would be incomplete without the most essential to his survival, which is of course his traveling companion and fellow refugee, and ultimately his greatest love. He finds her trapped in the ruins of a department store and thinks, in a moment of lucidity, of some tedious recent film he’d seen, where a half-mad castaway befriended a soccerball, and mourned its loss to the sea. He thinks briefly of Pygmalion, too. Five’s classical education was not lacking. 

He imagines her voice sort of low and wry, befitting her archaic smile. She’s just full of comebacks, and his sharp laughter echoes in the empty hallways and courtyards. She asks the right questions. She's a cheap date. They sit beside countless fires, they argue, they have a thousand conversations, a hundred thousand. Above all, she’s louder than the darker thoughts that compete for his attention, and it’s at her suggestion that he at last leaves the city, which is little more than a mass grave. 

_Dolores_ means sorrow, of course. But she is a light burden.


End file.
